Dear K-Loggers,

Bill Gates provides an easy to understand explanation of the power of weblogs
and RSS (notification) that may be useful as a way to explain it to your CEO...

_____________


"This (weblogs and RSS) is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want
to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this.
There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it
gets forwarded to them they'll wonder why I didn't put their name on it. But,
then again, I don't want to interrupt them or make them think this is some
deeply profound thing that I'm saying, but they might want to know. And so, you
have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.

Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to
come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web
site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go
to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste
time looking at it.

And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very
easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up
onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification.
And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write
about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and
it will be in a different folder and so only when you're interested in browsing
about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn't interfere with
your normal Inbox.

And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the
employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords
that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information.

And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail -- that it's too imposing --
and yet the drawbacks of the Web site -- that you don't know if there's
something new and interesting there -- this is about solving that.
The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want
it, and we're progressively getting better and better at that by watching your
behavior, ranking things in different ways."

___________

Sincerely,

John Robb


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]